Why I Will Shoot You Dead if You Try to Take Away My Assault Rifle


Democrats are too stupid to realize that gun control laws won’t work because criminals won’t obey them. 

Gun violence is the price that a freedom-loving people pay for living in a free country.

Without guns, peace becomes impossible. 

Despite having strict gun control laws, the people of Chicago and New York City shoot one another all the time. Clearly, gun control doesn’t work.

Guns aren’t the problem; guns are the solution. 

Problems precede solutions, so if we didn’t have guns, finding a solution to gun violence would be impossible. What is the solution to school shootings?...

Arm every teacher, close every window, lower every blind, station armed guards at every door, install body scanners, x-ray backpacks, and use any and all other means to protect our children as long as those means don’t impinge upon the Constitutional right of every American to go through life armed-to-the-teeth in order to protect themselves.

Emotions are running too high right now to discuss gun control. We should wait until we’ve gone a year or two without a mass shooting.

If Democrats really cared about protecting children, they wouldn’t politicize the problem. This just goes to show what hypocrites they are.

America doesn’t have a gun problem; America has a mental health problem. This is why so many Americans are crazy.

Remington plans to name its new high capacity assault rifle The Uvalde in honor of the children who died needlessly because their teachers weren’t armed. Gun manufacturers aren’t interested in making money but in selling good people guns so we can protect ourselves from the bad people they sell guns to.

Biden’s goal isn’t to protect our children, but to take away our guns so we can’t stop him from taking away our other freedoms. Democrats only voted for a man like that because they hate their country and want to destroy it.

I feel close to God when I send my thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. I know that prayer works, and that God will protect the people I’m praying for. Their kids might be dead, but my prayers will at least keep the parents safe.

Teachers who are unwilling to shoot people who threaten their students should go to work for KFC or some other place that mass murderers don’t frequent. 

God, not man, gave me the right to keep and bear arms. Giving up my guns would be like throwing God’s gift back in his face, and only a fool would throw things at God.

If Obama didn’t believe that guns protect people, he wouldn’t hide behind heavily armed bodyguards.

A lot of us Republicans are unwilling to pass laws to save the lives of children, but if it was pregnant women who were being murdered, that would be another matter because we care deeply about fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses. It’s only after babies are born that we lose interest, it being hard to love things that shit on themselves.

To summarize why I love guns in one word: Samuel L. Jackson.

Women need guns more than men because they’re the ones who get raped. I’m a 73-year-old man, and if someone tried to rape me, I would say, “Dude, are you blind!?”

God only helps those who help themselves, and he gave us guns for this purpose. Don’t ask for God’s help until you run out of bullets.

Every dumb-ass knows that fewer assault rifles would mean fewer dead children, but living guns are more useful than living children.

I saw an inspirational t-shirt at a gun show that read “A Lot of People Are Only Alive Because It Would Be Illegal to Shoot Them.” Graveyards would contain a lot more dead people if I could have legally shot every asshole who pissed me off.

The gun lobby speaks for me when it says, “I will only give up my gun when they pry my cold, dead finger from around its trigger.”

John Lennon speaks for me when he sings Happiness is a Warm Gun. Every time I hear that song, I remember that God always makes things happen for a reason, and the only reason he could have for making a man who was killed by a gun sing about how much he loved guns is that God loves guns.

Carrying a gun makes me feel I’m God because it gives me the power of life and death. For instance, I’ll be walking down the street smiling ear-to-ear because I’ll be thinking that if someone looks at me funny, I can shoot him dead right then and there because no matter how bad-ass he is, my .357 magnum makes me badder. That’s one hell of powerful feeling to have, so imagine how much more powerful that man in Vegas must have felt when he shot not just one person, and not just 100 people, but 500 people! Every time I replay the sound of his big old .50 cal, it gives me goosebumps because that’s how God sounds.

Foreign women drool and faint when they’re in the presence of an American man because they know that only men who carry guns are real men. Compared to American men, European men are like cardboard cut-outs that become flaccid in the rain. This is why European women would trade any fifty of their men for a single American man.

While it’s true that some children die after getting shot, the tough kids and the resilient kids walk away stronger for the experience. What’s more, every last one of them leaves the hospital knowing that if they had been carrying an assault rifle that day, the only corpse would have belonged to the bad guy. 

I personally look forward to the day when a school shooting survivor stands up at an NRA convention and tells the world how important it is that every American twelve years old and older carry an assault rifle. Ukrainian kids do it, yet Ukrainian kids are sissies compared to American kids.

If you don’t love guns, then you can’t love children because God made them both. Satan made Democrats, and because Satan is a liar, Democrats are lying when they say they care about children.

If we made gun ownership mandatory, people would treat one another better because they would be afraid the other man might shoot them before they could shoot him.

If we banned guns, mass murderers would use bombs, which means that not only would more children be killed, the schools themselves would be destroyed. I’ve heard Democrats argue that if the students were all dead, the schools wouldn’t be needed, but they only say this because they’re too stupid to realize that empty schools could be turned into homes for the elderly.

I need guns to protect me and my family. Without a gun, what am I supposed to do when my second grader is being shot at—throw sardines?

Except for the ones who own guns, students, actors, teachers, and emergency room doctors have no business talking about gun control because they’re prejudiced. I knew a man who wouldn’t even take a shower without his .45. Now, that’s the kind of man who has something useful to say about gun control. The world would be better off if we all stayed in our lane instead of straying into other people’s lanes. Too many wrecks happen that way.

God couldn’t be everywhere, so he gave us guns. “Thank you, Lord, for sending your son to die on the cross so that the people of America can own all the guns we want. We commit our lives to serving you, the NRA, and Donald Trump. Let’s hear it now: USA! USA! USA!

Even if we destroyed every gun on earth and made it impossible to replace them, people would still get shot, and their survivors would still need guns to keep other people from getting shot.

Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Until I pick it up, my assault rifle is no more dangerous than the Easter Bunny, but after I pick it up, my neighbors run behind a concrete wall.

I’ve kept one loaded assault rifle on my coffee table and another beside my bed since 1989, and none of them guns has shot a single person. The only time that one of them even went off was when my wife forgot to engage the safety while dusting it. The only “person” killed was her piano, which was shot 24 times, but she didn’t play it anyway.

Crime goes down when gun ownership goes up because when there are millions of guns on the market, criminals don’t have to steal them. This is what’s called a reverse ratio.

Criminals are less likely to shoot at you if they know you’re carrying a gun. This is especially true if they can see that your gun holds more bullets than their gun.

Gun violence exists because bad people have too many guns and good people have too few guns. If we make gun ownership mandatory, bad people will be outgunned.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution gives me the right to buy all the guns I can afford and to carry all the guns my arms can hold. 

The Uvalde shooter, like all mass murderers was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.” (https://www.businessinsider.com/texas-shooting-uvalde-paul-gosar-touts-false-claim-transgender-woman-2022-5). Therefore, the goal shouldn’t be outlawing guns but imprisoning illegals, chicken-shit cowards, Hillary Clinton, and Democrats who run pedophile sex rings out of DC pizza parlors.

I have given you a lot of sound reasons for why I will shoot you dead if you try to take away my guns. If you still don’t see things my way, you’re either an idiot or a Communist, and I hope you rot in hell. 

Finis

 

P.S. I’m going to be real with you now. If you think I made all this stuff up, visit the NRA website, listen to right-wing legislators, talk with gun loving family members, tune-in to conservative talk radio, and check-out gun rights newsgroups. No one does more to make the gun lobby look like a walking nightmare than the gun lobby itself. Just as the Republican Party has labeled the attempted violent takeover of the US government on January 6, legitimate political discourse,”* it has been bought-and-paid-for by people who claim to be Christian, yet have no particular problem with children being so mutilated by exploding bullets that their faces are unrecognizable.** Despite their worship of Satan in the form of an assault rifle, these Republicans claim that their love for Christ gives them a monopoly on love and morality. Were it not so, the 268 mass shootings that have occurred in America as of June 1, might be hard to stomach.


*https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/us/politics/republicans-jan-6-cheney-censure.html 

**https://theintercept.com/2022/05/26/ar-15-uvalde-school-shooting-vietnam-war/


A Life in Pain

 

As my regular readers know, I’ve suffered from significant middle-back, shoulder, and knee pain for many years. Eighteen months ago, I started developing low back pain. In February, it got so bad that my pain specialist ordered an MRI. When the radiologist said I might have a tumor, the pain specialist ordered a follow-up MRI. The second MRI didn’t show a tumor, but it did show “degenerative changes of the lumbar spine.” Perhaps, these changes were put in motion when I broke my first lumbar vertebra in 2013.

Over the years, I’ve had to give up hiking, biking, camping, and even neighborhood walks, but I was somehow able to do yard work. Yesterday, just getting my tools out for yard work left me in so much pain that I came indoors. I can still do light housework, but it has started leaving me winded. My internist suspects a heart problem, so he ordered a number of tests, the last of which is scheduled for tomorrow. I wonder if the problem could simply be caused by holding my breath because of the pain. 

I have been in worse pain (pain that felt like being stabbed in both shoulders with ice picks), but I’ve never been so nearly devoid of hope. Oxycodone helps, but getting enough oxycodone is impossible. Because I’m at the top dosage of oxycodone, the pain specialist suggested morphine or Dilaudid, but I hate to go to a new drug because of the time it would take to reach an effective dose. A major fear of mine is that the anti-narcotic forces will persuade legislatures to deny narcotics to people in chronic pain. If that should happen, I would have to either live in utter misery or shop the Dark Web for Fentanyl. Because Peggy is opposed to the latter, I would be in an impossible situation. 

I stayed awake for my prostate surgery last month. When I told the anesthesiologist that the surgical area felt fine, but that my back was killing me from lying on the hard surgical table, he gave me dose after dose of Fentanyl until I was completely free of pain for the first time in a long time. If I could feel that way everyday, it would be worth dying sooner, because the life I’m now living hardly qualifies as life.

I wrote the above yesterday, not knowing if I would put it online (I have come to share very little of what I write, either online or through correspondence). When I got up this morning, the following all but bubbled out of me, and I think I might put it and what I wrote yesterday online. Here is what years of living with chronic pain has been like…

A toothache that is horrible at times, and less horrible at other times, but is always there. Feeling like a physical and emotional weakling. Feeling that the person I used to be has gone away, and I don’t know where to find him. Not being able to enjoy things. Not looking forward to things. Not liking anything or anyone. Blaming myself for being in pain and for letting it rob me of a happy life. Not being able to concentrate or remember things. Being edgy, and feeling like a fool for being edgy. Suspecting that the world is full of people who are in more pain than I but are handling it better. Avoiding social engagements. Knowing that people will pity and avoid me if I tell them how much I hurt.

Looking forward to doctor’s appointments because doctors are friend substitutes who won’t reject me for telling them how I feel. Drawing-in on myself so I don’t have to deal with challenges. Dreading being in even more pain and losing even more mobility. Being awakened throughout the night by pain. Structuring my life around pain-avoidance. Wondering how I am going to pay for the household jobs that I can no longer do for myself. Tensing my body because Im afraid to relax. Holding my breath because breathing hurts. Feeling like a cripple, an invalid, a has-been. Feeling sorry for Peggy because she married a loser. Wondering where my friends went. 

Feeling like I’m losing my mind. Wondering how much longer I can hold-on. Worrying that pain and medicine will shorten my life. Feeling that if I were stronger, I wouldn’t need so many drugs. Blaming myself because I haven’t found a way out of the pain. Knowing that no one on earth understands what I’m going through because I look like a normal person. Wondering if people think I’m making it all up. Wondering if people consider me a boring whiner. Believing that I should avoid people because no one would want to be around me anyway. 

I won’t even try to wrap this up with a satisfying conclusion. I will instead put it online pretty much as I wrote it.

A Post-Surgical Update

 

Here is how Johns Hopkins describes the surgery I had on Thursday: “A transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP) is surgery to remove parts of the prostate gland through the penis.  The surgeon reaches the prostate by putting an instrument into the end of the penis and through the urethra. This instrument is…12 inches long and .5 inch in diameter. It contains a lighted camera and valves that control irrigating fluid. It also contains an electrical wire loop that cuts tissue and seals blood vessels. The wire loop is guided by the surgeon to remove the tissue blocking the urethra one piece at a time. The pieces of tissue are carried by the irrigating fluid into the bladder and flushed out at the end of the procedure.”*

Four days post-op, I’m seriously fatigued and bored out of my mind, but aside from the fact that it hurts to pee, my pain has been minor. I can slowly start working my way toward normal functioning in two weeks, at which time I’m supposed to let bleeding be my guide to what I can do.

 
I told the anesthesiologist (a delightful man named Albert Cho) that I wanted to stay awake for what was supposed to be a 90-minute surgery—but ended up taking two hours—and he readily agreed. There being a drape between us and the other five or so people in the room, we had an intimate conversation that I would enjoy sharing if I knew he would be okay with it. 

Surgical tables are hard, and the longer I lay there, the more my back hurt. When I asked for relief, he gave me Fentanyl. The pain didn’t go away until I hit 200 mcgs, an apparently large amount that I could only tolerate because I’ve taken narcotics every day for years. Fentanyl is awesome. I was wearing a Fentanyl patch when I crushed my thumb (after breaking my back) in 2014. When I realized that I had closed the bathroom door on my thumb, I said to myself, “That must hurt...” and then, By god, it does hurt!” and I opened the door.


When the surgeon visited me in recovery, I asked if there had been a problem, and he said no. I knew this couldn’t be altogether true both because of how long the surgery took, and because there had come a point at which the people on the far side of the drape had switched from talking to whispering. When he left, I asked my nurse (who hadn’t heard my conversation with the surgeon) what had happened, and she said I had bled more than expected, and the surgeon had thought it prudent to keep me in surgery a while longer. 


Recovery rooms are dismal places, what with people moaning, puking, and talking out of their heads—and that’s just the nurses—but I couldn’t go to a room because they were all occupied. I worried that I might have to spend the night in recovery (which has sometimes happened at Peggy’s former hospital), but my nurse predicted that I would be out of recovery in an hour or two, and she was right. My room being ready, off I went to meet my nurse, 27-year old Kristina, with whom I felt an instant rapport. I was so happy to have the surgery behind me that I babbled like a chimp. Before our time together ended, I was in envy of the man whose luck it is to be her father.


I left surgery with a double lumen urinary catheter, which consists of one tube carrying sterile water in, and another tube draining blood, clots, and urine out. Before entering my urethra, these tubes were joined together in a larger tube, which was taped to my thigh at one end and secured to my bladder with something resembling a balloon at the other. The balloon’s pressure made me imagine that I had to urinate, but there was nothing I could do about it. Nearly all of my post-op pain is due to the fact that it hurts to pee. My penis is black and blue, and my urethra feels sunburned, yet all of my post-op pain combined is minor compared to the back pain I’m in daily.


Most hospital nurses work twelve-hour shifts (hospitals appearing to be okay with the fact that consecutive twelve-hour shifts result in medical errors, job burnout, and car wrecks involving nurses who fall asleep at the wheel), so at 7:00 that evening, Kristina was replaced by Yani, whom I also liked and trusted. Before Kristina left, she said she would see me the next day. An hour before shift change the next morning, Yani said the same, so imagine my dismay when a gruff man with a loud voice—and a student nurse in tow—was introduced as my new nurse. I seek to avoid loud people, so his volume combined with my unhappiness over what I regarded as his hypermasculine persona, led to an unhappy relationship. On the other hand, he seemed competent and showed pride in his work, so my only real objection was that I didn’t care for him, and I didn’t think he cared for me. 

I tried to find out why Kristina had been replaced, but no one knew, although they admitted being surprised by it (I also learned that Kristina had spoken highly of me). I hate having to put up with things that make no sense to me, especially when I’m paying for them.


Before being sent home, I had to pass a two-part test. In part one, I had to pee into a urinal and show the result to my nurse. Part two was identical to part one. Had I flunked, I would have been sent home with a catheter that drained into a small bag during the day and a large bag at night. I easily passed, but my urine continues to be bloody, and I’m told that it might remain that way for quite some time. When I’m not peeing blood, I’m dribbling blood, but the nursing student who prepared me to go home offered nothing with which to catch the dribble. When I asked what she proposed, she gave me a stack of abdominal dressings, but I found that blood passed right through them, so I switched to stuffing my underwear with old washcloths, which cost nothing and are adequate for the task. Some men spend the rest of their lives dribbling, so I can but hope for the best.

 

*https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/transurethral-resection-of-the-prostate-turp

On Last Week’s Surgery and this Week’s Surgery

Last Friday (April 8), I had a posterior capsulotomy. This is a laser procedure in which a hole is cut through a cloudy, post cataract surgery lens in order to allow the cloudiness to dissipate. So far, I’m not seeing any great improvement in vision, but the resultant floaters are driving me nuts. They are large and appear to move more rapidly than ordinary floaters. Depending upon where I am looking and how distant they appear, I mistake them for gnats near my face, roaches on countertops, and spiders on walls and floors. Yesterday, I sidestepped what I mistook for a mouse crossing my path. I am told that the floaters will “probably” get better.

Later this week, I’m to have a transurethral resection of the prostate, which is the name of a surgical procedure that’s performed through the penis in order to reduce the size of an enlarged prostate. Death is unlikely (one man in a thousand), but incontinence afflicts ten out of a hundred, five of them long-term or permanently.

I’m up to twenty-plus surgeries depending upon what one counts as a surgery (is a posterior capsulotomy a surgery?), but instead of growing accustomed to them, I dread them increasingly because: (1) the risks worry me more; (2) the care I receive is often impersonal and sometimes egregiously callous or glaringly incompetent; (3) Whether they’re minor or major, somewhere along the line of the many people and departments that are necessary to make a surgery possible, mistakes happen, always; (4) The older I get, the more slowly I heal; (5) I have to be at the hospital hours before I usually get out of bed, and surgery is a crummy way to start the day; (6) I chafe under the limits imposed upon me during convalescence (I’m not supposed to lift more than ten pounds for six weeks following this surgery, which is nothing compared to the limits imposed after rotator cuff repairs and major joint replacements).

I try to reconcile myself to the things I fear or dislike by remembering that, if things go well, my life will be better for having had the surgery, and that I should be grateful to have access to medical care that is denied to most of the world’s people. In the 1950s, I saw my impoverished grandmother go blind in both eyes for want of cataract surgery, and after five hernia repairs, I know something of how miserable and limiting hernias are (I try to put myself in the shoes of a poor laborer whose family will starve if he can’t perform heavy labor, but who is sure to die a horrible death from bowel strangulation if he continues to work). 

A hundred years ago, the average American man died at age 59; today it’s 76, and without modern medicine, I would already be dead. I remind myself of such things, but counting ones blessings can make a person feel bad about himself for complaining at all. By way of comparison, if you try to reconcile yourself to having a toothache by telling yourself that your problem is nothing compared to dodging missiles in Ukraine, not only will your tooth hurt as much, you will hate yourself for being a whiner and a wimp.

 

Update: My speech difficulty being worse in the morning, Peggy  called the hospital an hour ago to ask why we haven’t heard from the anesthesia department (they invariably schedule pre-op tests and a consultation a few days prior to surgery). She was told that the hospital doesn’t have me on its surgery schedule (perhaps the doctor’s office never contacted them). Upon learning this, Peggy immediately called the doctor’s office, but it’s nearly impossible to get them on the phone, and they take hours to call back. I have also called them, but I have no idea if the urgency in my voice will inspire them to act.

So it is that mistakes always, always, always happen, and the patient can never, ever sit-back and trust that what is supposed to be done will be done in the way that it should be done. Instead, the patient can but hope that the mistakes will be temporarily frustrating rather than life-altering or fatal. In this case, if there’s no operating room available, the surgery will have to be postponed, and because I was getting in early due to another patient’s cancellation, I could end up waiting months.

All about Peggy: Part 2: Dancing with Bears


Peggy’s first adventure with bears occurred while camped in the Arizona desert (the place was named the Coronado National Forest because of its ten-foot tall trees). Our camper consisted of a bear-defeating aluminum canopy mounted on the bed of a pristine white ’73 Datsun truck named Lolita. I so loved Lolita that I at least sponge-bathed her daily when we were away, including the engine compartment. Such compulsion is burdensome, but I couldn’t imagine driving down the road in a truck that wasn’t sufficiently clean for surgery. Peggy later complained that our photo album contained more pictures of Lolita than of her. This was true, but it was also true that I hadn’t followed-up on my plan to put a wedding ring on Lolita’s cute little distributor cable, and that the only presents I had given her were things like spark plugs and oil filters that Peggy didn’t care for anyway. To make a long story less long…

There we were, in the middle of the night, camped sixty miles from the Old West town of Tombstone, when my young bride suddenly and inexplicably announced that she had to “tinkle.” The park service had thoughtfully provided an outhouse for such troublemakers, but between us and it gamboled a large flock of feisty bears who were pursuing their hobby of emptying garbage cans and demolishing coolers. As Readers’ Digest regularly reminded its readers, what bears most enjoy doing is killing attractive young women—a description that still fits Peggy perfectly despite her advanced years—by hiding in outhouses and ripping-off their arms, legs, and heads before working-up to serious damage.

Aside from sunny and safe Sunday afternoon outings to the Jackson, Mississippi, zoo where the bears are tastefully locked behind stout iron bars so that courageous adolescent boys can impress wide-eyed adolescent girls by taunting them (the bears, I mean), Peggy and I had never laid eyes on an actual, in-the-flesh bear. Worse yet, these Arizona bears were nothing like the Jackson zoo bears in that these bears were looking high and low for innocent young camperettes. What’s more, they had us surrounded, and the moonless night was every bit as dark as a moonless night. 

Despite these unhappy statistics, Peggy remained grimly determined to pee. Such stubbornness represented a side to her that I hadn’t seen, and that troubled me greatly because, as I told myself, any woman who becomes this stubborn over a trivial matter like peeing would be capable of committing any manner of faux pas in the face of something important. 

Having nothing better to do at the moment, I decided to approach Peggy’s problem through the application of intelligent thought. Specifically, I thought about the following: (a) Our bed occupied the entire interior of the camper; (b) The canopy roof was too low for Peggy to squat over a jar; (c) Peggy might find it impossible to pee safely and effectively within the confines of a space that rendered safe and effective peeing impossible; (d) The solution to Peggy’s problem lay in solving for X when X=a+b÷3.14-7. Because I had no idea how to solve for X, or what solving for X would even accomplish, I regrettably concluded that intelligent thought is a waste of time except when boiling popcorn.

However (and it was BIG however), I saw in a flash that the cerebration of the stupidest man who ever lived is so superior to that of the most brilliant woman (Peggy), that I had no choice but to cancel my subscription to Ms Magazine. “What are you talking about?” you ask. I am talking about how a man, any man, could, in three easy steps, solve a problem that had short-circuited the brain of the female genius who lay squirming at my side with yellow liquid sloshing against her teeth. Here are those steps: (a) raise the camper door (this is extremely important); (b) lie on one’s side; (c) pee through the open door!

Irrefutable though my reasoning was, I knew it would be ill-advised to share it with a member of a gender that becomes overcome by feelings of feminine inferiority in the face of male rationality, so I settled for suggesting to Peggy that she tell her bladder to stop whining until the bears had gone to bed. I shed a tear when she promised to do her best because, inadequate though her best would be, not even a man could do more than that. Unfortunately…

As time passed, Peggy’s moaning and squirming achieved the desperation of a sugar cube in boiling water. Between moans, we could hear the bears snickering as they awaited her emergence, but we could tell that some of them had moved to another part of the campground. It was then that a plan presented itself. Peggy said it was time for extreme measures, so she would get out of bed and pee by the back bumper while I stood lookout. “That doesn’t sound like much of a plan to my male brain,
” I said, but if it’s what you want, I’ll lie in bed and protect you,” To my dismay, she made the power-hungry argument that I could best protect her by getting out of the camper for a less obstructed view, and to be on hand to eviscerate criminally-disposed bears. I told her that she sounded arrogant, masculine, and shrill, and it was then that the air became pregnant with tension. 

Peggy finally said that I could do as I pleased, but that if I stayed in bed, she too would stay in bed, and her side of the bed would most assuredly remain dry. Dry from what, I didn’t know, but her tone sounded ominous, so I offered to accompany her. We knew there were no bears behind the truck because there was no noise behind the truck, so I exited first—Peggy was insistent on this point—and chivalrously helped her to exit. Once on the ground, it was my job to stand beside her as I leaned from one side of the back of the truck to the other so that no bears could sneak-up on us.

As I was heroically occupied in doing my job, Peggy busied  herself by keeping a bone-crushing grip on my calf while tinkling as fast as she could go. Simple though these tasks were, she performed them admirably, although I later found it necessary to chide her for bruising my shin and calf. I also took issue with the fact that she had peed on my foot. “How could this have happened?” you ask. It happened because I had been so dedicated to doing my job properly that I took no notice of Peggy’s failure to do the same, the result being that when warm liquid ran across my foot and made mud pies inside my dusty flip-flop, I didn’t immediately divine its source. The situation could have been worse, of course, had the bears found the odor so maddening that they charged us like Crazy Horse charged Custer. 


What I learned about peeing that night was that, on the one hand, abject terror can make peeing impossibly unavoidable; on the other hand, it can make it unavoidably impossible. Such considerations notwithstanding, Peggy stuck to the task at hand. When she emerged victorious, I said that, in the interest of companionability, I too would pee, and that, in the interest of chivalry, she would guard me as I had guarded her. When she didn
’t respond, I looked toward where she had been and found myself alone in a moonless wilderness.

I naturally concluded that bears had martyred my beloved, so imagine my dismay when I happened to glance into the camper and found that she was cleaning her facial pores with witch hazel. When I, too, had returned to our snug fortress, I respectfully inquired, “Had I been massacred, Dear, would you have pulled my corpse to safety or left it for the rangers to stumble upon while you toured the Grand Canyon?” Snores prevented her from answering, so I broached the subject again over breakfast, adding that she should have informed me of her proclivity for snoring before we were married, so I could have decided upon the advisability of a shared future. I also asked if she had withheld other fatal flaws, but I regretted my cruel words a moment later when her pretty face reflected the anguish of a sensitive soul who was too remorseful to speak. I have no idea why, but everyone else on earth mistakes the expression for boredom.

Part Two

After moving to Oregon, Peggy and I camped every other week in pretty weather, staying out for 2-3 nights at a time in areas so remote that we seldom saw anyone (in Oregon, such places are easy to find). When sleeping in Lolita became uncomfortable for my beloved’s constantly aging joints, I magnanimously surprised her with a vintage 3/4 ton van with almost no dents and a high ground clearance for traversing rutted logging roads. On this occasion—as on many others—she was so overwhelmed by gratitude that she went through four stages of self-expression. 

Stage 1: Peggy is unable to make a sound. 

Stage 2: Peggy makes sounds resembling speech, but no one knows what they mean.

Stage 3: Peggy jokingly asks if I can get our money back.

Stage 4: Peggy jumps up and down in her characteristic happy dance; smiles her grimace-like smile; and pours out her gratitude with such playful teases as, “I hope you bought me a parachute so I won’t break a leg getting out of the _____ thing.” Many people claim that Peggy’s childlike humor is her most endearing quality, and that they hope to experience it someday. 

By happy coincidence, Oregon’s black bear population abounds alongside salal, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, salmonberries, huckleberries, and hazelnuts. On the joyful day in question, we were biking down an abandoned coastal logging road when I spotted three bear cubs not twenty feet away. I threw on brakes and exclaimed, “Sweetheart, bride of my youth, look, oh look, at the darling little bears!” I naturally interpreted her silence as the product of unspeakable delight, so imagine my dismay when I turned toward where she had been, and found that I had been speaking to a tree. I naturally assumed that a bear had eaten her and was busy accustoming myself to widowerhood when I chanced to see a woman who resembled my late wife receding into the distance as fast as her pretty legs could pedal her sexy red bike. Because I knew that Peggy would want me to love again, I set out after the mysterious “woman on red,” but a race horse couldn’t have caught her.

Some might say that Peggy, unlike her husband, behaved rationally given that mother bears tend to annihilate anything that comes near their cubs, trees included. I would respond that there is not a single record of a single black bear killing or injuring a single person to protect a single cub (although their predilection for human flesh often inspires them to peel people like bananas). What black bears are on record for doing is running rapidly away from their little ones at the merest hint of danger. Therefore, if you should someday sneeze while walking through the woods, you should immediately recite whatever prayer you remember (“God is great; God is good; let us thank God for our food” became favored by many after a news report claimed that
no one who used it reported being killed by a bear) because you are in grave danger of being flattened by one or more fleeing bears...The image of a female abandoning her loved ones brings my thoughts back to Peggy.

“Why,” I demanded, when I finally found her cowering in her bedroom closet two days later, “did you abandon me to certain death?” “I didn’t abandon you,” she mumbled while staring at the floor. “Like you, I wanted to get all drippy while schmoozing with Pattington Bear
’s mother, but because I love you, I gave up what I wanted in order to get help for you in case she turned out to be half grizzly.”

The realization that my wife held my physical prowess in such low esteem that she didn’t trust me to protect her from a buttress of brutal bruins hurt my feelings twenty times worse than had she proclaimed me a bear-destroyer
par eccellenza, but I was too scared to tell her that, so I rhetorically asked, “My gentlest darling, was that really why you rode away as fast as your wrinkled legs could pedal your sexy red bike?” “How could you have doubted it?” she cooed. “After all, Snowie darling, you know what grizzlies are like because we almost saw a whole gaggle of them on that trail in Canada. If those hikers we met hadn’t told us that there were bears ahead, and if we hadn’t run to the car and stampeded back to Montana without even stopping at the border station, you would have shown those Canucks what you were made of, and it wouldn’t have been pretty.” “You’re right, my brown-eyed nymphet. If I hadn’t gotten homesick for the Home of the Brave, I might have pixillated every bear in Canada because I’m so intimidating that there are days when I don’t dare look at myself in the mirror. It was here that she kissed my cheek. Most people mistake Peggy for a total hard-ass, but she can be half nice when she puts her whole heart into it.

Next time All About Peggy: Part 3: Peggy Abandons Me to a Flurry of Hawaiian Wolverines